Alumni Ink

Secret Recipes

Food writer, chef, and Food Network personality Adam Roberts 01C 04L, founder of the Amateur Gourmet website, has finally published the book his fans have been wanting him to write for years: Secrets of the Best Chefs: Recipes, Techniques, and Tricks from America' Greatest Cooks (2012, Artisan). "I wanted to create a portrait of American cooking," says Roberts, who recently did a book signing at Emory' Barnes and Noble bookstore. "The idea was this: I would cook shoulder-to-shoulder with the nation' best chefs, learning three recipes from each of them, which I would then take home and recreate in my own kitchen." During the course of writing the book, he cooked with superstar chefs Alice Waters, Lidia Bastianich, Nancy Silverton, Harold Dieterle, Vinny Dotolo, Jon Shook, Sara Moulton, and Jonathan Waxman. Noted pastry chef Gina DePalma shared the lentil soup with sausage, chard, and garlic recipe that eased her through the worst of her chemotherapy. And when Roberts cooked with fellow Emory alumnus Linton Hopkins 92C, Hopkins reminded him that "learning how to value food properly requires a certain amount of discrimination."—Michelle Valigursky

Dog Sense

Gary Borjesson 94G 97PhD of Ashland, Oregon, a professor at St. John' College, is the author of the recently published Willing Dogs and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs (2012, Paul Dry Books), a philosophical book written for a popular audience about what we can learn about human relationships from reflecting upon our relationships with our dogs. "Dogs instinctively grasp . . . how we make friends for, like us, they are descended from a line of predators whose very minds have been shaped by the quest and the premium it places on cooperation," he writes.

Teaching Jesus

Jesus' parables were told some two thousand years ago, but they are just as relevant today, believes Joseph Faulkner 49C 53T 56G, a retired university professor and ordained United Methodist minister who has rewritten twenty-three of the parables in Jesus' Parables in Today' Language. For example: instead of on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho, the man beaten up and left on the roadside becomes a Wal-Mart employee traveling from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.; the good Samaritan becomes a good Muslim who is an immigrant to this country; for the landowner who hires people at different times of the day and pays them equally—the hired workers are now Mexican immigrants. "I am happy to say it has been adopted for bible study in churches here in Pennsylvania and as far west as Texas," says Faulkner.—M.J.L.